An Imaginary Lockdown From Past Years

Yes, it was smallpox, I remember it too.

Later we had typhoid fever that started in Aberdeen and was traced back to an infected tin of corned beef!

Between these too, there was a polio epidemic, at least in Scotland.

None of these needed a lockdown, as vaccines were available for smallpox and polio, and you couldn't start school in Scotland unless you had been vaccinated against smallpox, so it was only children under five that had to be vaccinated quickly.

I can't remember the precautions taken against typhoid, but I have a vague feeling there were travel restrictions in and around Aberdeen. Anyone remember more clearly than I?

As a child it would have annoyed me not to be able to go to school, but otherwise a lockdown wouldn't have bothered me at all.

We had less developed health care and science but also less scary media. I think we were more inclined to follow government advice too.
I remember the white sheet over the table and huddling underneath in case of a nuclear blast!

grandtanteJE65 I’d forgotten about the typhoid outbreak due to contaminated corn beef. I had a google to refresh my memory. There’s an interesting BBC article from 2014 fifty years on.

I’ll try posting the link here. It includes a b&w photo of parents looking in at quarantined children in hospitals. They only had window visits just like the current situation in care homes.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-26957972

I remember that typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen. I was in Dundee at the time and one of my housemates was very anxious about it. She went to the doctor and demanded a typhoid vaccination which made her feel most unwell. The outbreak was well contained and there was never any cause for panic. When I was 15, I was in a large group from Ayrshire schools who were going to France and had to have typhoid vaccinations (this was 1956). A friend passed out on her way home from school and I had violent shivers all night, though both of us were fine the next morning.

Just read the link and realise my memory was wrong: there was indeed no cause for panic! In Dundee we were "just down the road" from Aberdeen, so it was a wonder that they managed to contain the outbreak so efficiently.

I’ve been in lockdown as an adult with children when living abroad, although not for virus seasons. There had been terrorist attacks in the country we were living in. We had to be prepared to be airlifted out at just a few minutes notice, which meant having grab bags within reach at all times. We were not allowed out and schools etc were closed. Luckily, we lived on a private estate so my two DD’s could go outside and use the swimming pool but it was all rather tedious. After three weeks, we were ‘set free’ again but so much had changed regarding security including armed soldiers patrolling the girls’ school and shopping malls etc.

I’ve just finished reading a book about the 1918 Spanish flu. It’s pretty clear from that that the places which instigated lockdown very early faired much better than those that didn’t. Spanish flu sounds terrifying, with people dropping dead in the streets, children dying at their school desks, entire families succumbing to the illness within hours of each other. The book also says that there was a collective memory loss over it, maybe because it was overshadowed by the Great War, even though more died from the flu than the war. The virus was only identified in around the year 2000.

When I was born in 1953 in the East End of London there was an outbreak of TB. My mother contracted it and was found to be pregnant on diagnosis. She was told she would have to have an abortion which she did not want. She was then told there was only one doctor and one clinic who would take as a pregnant women to be cared for through her TB where she went to wait for me and have Streptomycin which was somewhat experimental on a pregnant woman. When I was born she was allowed a brief cuddle and then I was whisked away to another town to be placed in a nursery until I was six months old. No wonder we didn't get on.

Callistemon so true.